A side-to-end vascular anastomosis, in which an end of a vessel is surgically joined to the side of another vessel within a patient, is required for a variety of medical procedures. For example; a cranial bypass utilizes the flow of the temporal artery located on the outside of the skull to divert a portion of its flow to one of the arteries within the skull to provide additional blood flow within the patient's brain. One of the major considerations when performing any anastomosis is that the flow of bodily fluid within the vessel must be interrupted for the duration of the procedure of joining the vessels. This interruption of flow may have a detrimental effect on the proximal tissue and to the patient's health in general.
The most common method of vascular anastomosis that is presently practiced is hand suturing one vessel to the other. This process is not only difficult and time consuming, but requires a high degree of surgical skill and a considerable amount of time and patience, as a plurality of sutures are required to achieve a fluid impermeable seal between the two vessels. Incorrect suturing requires additional sutures, and in turn increases the time which the flow of bodily fluid must remain suspended.
Therefore, in view of the foregoing, what is needed in the art is a more rapid and dependable system of vascular side-to-end anastomosis which would require less time to reliably join the vessels and therefore decrease the duration of suspended flow and as a result pose less of a health threat to the patient.